To the editor:

Language is powerful. Words matter.

Before 1973, it was illegal for a pregnant woman who was widowed by the untimely death of her husband or raped by a stranger or family member to obtain an abortion. No man can ever know how agonizing it must be to make such a decision.

The Supreme Court ruled that a woman has a right to an abortion. Some people opposed this right and organized to try to overturn it. They called this organization the “pro-life” movement. They said that a woman who made this decision was taking a life and therefore abortion was immoral.

This misappropriation of language was so effective that within one generation, the plurality of Americans polled were against abortion. George Orwell’s “newspeak” aside, a woman’s right to choose morphed into murder. The media adopted this terminology from the anti-choice movement with little examination.

In 2010, many in the so-called tea party movement and many Republicans running for the House and the Senate are on record as opposing all abortion, even in cases of rape and incest.

If you support a woman’s right to make her own decision about her own body and her future, whether she chooses abortion or not, you will not allow the government to go back to the days when it made her decisions for her.

Elections are powerful. Votes matter.